Three Strands and Some Patience
by spidersaremykryptonite
Summary: Eliot knows that long hair is impractical in his profession, he does. It's an easy handhold for an opponent to yank on, pain and restraint all in one and it doesn't even take much skill. And yet.


Eliot knows that long hair is impractical in his profession, he does. It's an easy handhold for an opponent to yank on, pain and restraint all in one and it doesn't even take much skill.

And yet.

The thing is, his hair was always long as a kid. His redneck daddy never gave his boy the time of day and Eliot couldn't be bothered to cut it, so out it grew 'til it fell to his shoulders. By the time he finally got a haircut, he wouldn't let it be trimmed shorter than his shoulders—his mama liked to play with it, see. Said it made the noise in her head go quiet when she sat behind him and pulled a brush through 'til it was silky, liked to weave her fingers through the strands and tease it into braids. Her hands were skilled and well practiced. He never wore the braids out of the house, too caught up in what his football friends might think, but he would sit perfectly still while his mama twisted and twirled the strands until she would smooth her hands over his shoulders and send him off to the mirror with a soft, tired smile, tugging at the bandana or hat that concealed the tufting regrowth of her own hair.

When he joined the army, they made him shear it all off, and his hair was short when he went to war. It was short when the SAT-phone crackled in his ear and they told him his mama's cancer was back, and it was short when they told him she was dead. His hair was short when the flag in his heart burned away until his country meant nothing but blood. His hair was short when he let Damian Moreau own him.

When he broke free—if you could call it that, what he was now—he wandered, a shadow, seeing nothing but the dead and the not-dead-yet, counting all the ways he could kill any given person he passed, all the ways he himself might die, counting all the ways he would deserve it. When Toby found him, when Toby turned knives from destruction to creation in his hands, taught him to cook and to taste and to wake up again, his hair was past his ears.

He didn't leave the business—fighting was in his blood, like it or not, and however much pleasure he took in the food he made, it wasn't enough to be his life. Food was his sanctuary, but it couldn't be all he was and he itched for the fight. He had a reputation; people in the life knew his name, feared it, wanted it. There were plenty of jobs when he let word get out he was looking, and this time it was his choice whose blood he spilt. He remade himself into a retrieval specialist, made his own rules—no hits, no kids, no guns—and he kept his hair long.

On nights when the nightmares were bad and his skin itched but he was so exhausted he couldn't cook or fight the burn out of his blood, he would sit in front of a mirror and brush and brush his hair till it was silky, imagining he could still smell his mother's perfume, feel her warmth behind him. He would take up the strands and try to twist it in his hands the way she did. His braids were clumsy, lumpy, loose and uneven, and his hands which were so skilled and graceful when curled around knives in the kitchen or in a fight struggled to find the nimble grace of his mother's thin fingers. Sometimes he would sit and braid 'til dawn, find himself with aching fingers in the sunrise. Sometimes, the noise in his head grew quiet, and he would go to sleep with messy untethered braids. In the morning, he would unravel them and erase the evidence.

He got better at braiding, but you could never really call it good—maybe only good enough. Besides, looking good wasn't the point. He still kept them secreted away for himself, a private ritual, not for public consumption.

The first time he saw Parker's hair in its sleek braid, he stared at it. Felt the ghost of his mama's fingers. He let his gaze linger a moment too long, and she noticed, cocking her head and quirking an eyebrow curiously. He jerked his head away. The first time he saw Parker braiding her hair, fingers twisting with thief's grace, he stared. Watched the ease with which she wove the strands, almost absentmindedly, and thought of his mother's satisfied smile, thought of the single mindedness that focused his writhing thoughts as he struggled to get it right on late nights in the dark.

He made a habit of watching Parker braid her hair—he couldn't help it. It felt familiar and safe. He tried to be subtle, always avoided Nate and Sophie and Hardison's attention. But Parker knew anyway, he was sure. She never looked him in the eye, never challenged him or invited him, but she would position herself in the room so that she was always in his line of sight when she braided, would come to meetings with hair flying loose just to wind it into gleaming ropes.

They had known each other a year the first time Parker touched his hair. They were sitting on the couch watching a football game—rather, Eliot was watching the game and Parker was amusing herself with a collection of locks and increasingly improbable tools for picking them. When she put down the tools and stared at him, Eliot was unphased; Parker liked to stare at people sometimes, and had none of the ordinary shyness or shame. She just liked looking, so he let her.

He almost didn't notice at first, her fingers so nimble and light, like she was stealing him. She had gotten the first crossover done when it clicked and he snatched her hands away, shoving them back at her. Harder than he meant to.

"Don't!" he snarled. No one had touched his hair with grace, with tenderness, not since his mother.

Parker slipped her hands from his grasp, holding them close to her chest, eyes blown wide. Then she was gone.

Eliot's heart was racing in his chest, regret blooming viciously in his veins and grief clawing its way out of old wounds. He barely saw the rest of the football game, caught in the tangles of memory and shame. Parker was sharp and quick, but somehow fragile, somehow so kind. He clenched his fists and tucked them away, struck for the first time in a long time at how violence had threaded its way through him so utterly.

Parker skittered around him for days, not truly afraid, but wary, certainly. Her fingers still tucked and wove her hair, a habit not so easily disrupted, but she didn't pose the same way, didn't offer the ritual to Eliot as she had before. Eliot felt the loss.

At night, his mind wouldn't quiet. He sat before the mirror in the moonlight and brushed and brushed and then he took up the strands but in the shadows he saw the wideness of Parker's eyes, her fingers tucked closed to her heart. His fingers were clumsy and all wrong and the braiding wasn't the same. He had tainted it.

Sleep became elusive, even more so than usual. Days and nights dragged on, and even his impressive ability to cope with sleeplessness was strained. He was just. So. Tired.

Parker noticed.

"Eliot?"

Parker's voice was quiet, timid—and unexpected—but Eliot didn't move. The rest of the team had gone home hours ago. He thought she'd gone with them. But there was nothing waiting for him at home, nothing but another sleepless night, so he'd stayed at the office where this terrible loneliness that had begun to grow was just a little bit less. It was silly. He'd been alone in all the ways that mattered for so much of his life. Braided hair shouldn't leave this gnawing shadow in his lungs.

He had cooked himself a beautiful meal because cooking, at least, was still good. Untainted. But it had never been enough on its own. Never would be. He had tried to watch TV, but the shifting colours couldn't hold his attention, so he had wandered aimlessly around the office space like it was a museum, an art gallery, looking for all the little footprints his team had left scattered around. The soft fabrics of some of Sophie's many costumes stuffed in a closet, the heavy glass tumblers Nate favoured, knives and ropes and money secreted away in little caches, half-deconstructed and unrecognizable electronics left like so many rotting corpses.

Eventually he ran out of wandering and sat on the couch with his head in his hands in the dark, and he felt horribly, suspiciously close to tears.

"Eliot?" Parker's voice floated through the dark again, a little closer this time. His head felt heavy. He kept still. He heard her footsteps then, light and quick. She was standing behind him now, and he could almost feel her fluttering there, unsure. Her go-to solutions were stealing or stabbing, and neither were likely to suffice. And then she vaulted the back of the couch, sinking gracefully to the cushion beside him.

"Eliot?" she said a third time, stretching a hand out to rest feather-light fingertips on his arm. "Can I braid your hair?"

His breath caught, and Parker held so very still, and he almost wrenched away, as though to preserve something sacred, as though he hadn't already tainted it. Very slowly, he nodded.

Parker hopped up to sit on the back of the couch, legs leaning against his left side, and then there was the gentle rhythmic slide of a brush through his hair. More gentle than he might have supposed she could be, frenetic as she so often was. With each pull of the brush, something eased a little looser in his chest, an ugly tightness he hadn't even noticed was there. By the time Parker set aside the brush and began to nimbly weave his hair into a menagerie of little braids, tears were dripping softly down Eliot's cheeks. They were old tears, tears that had waited for the air for many years, finally free.

When she ran out of hair to braid, Parker slipped down the back of the couch and curled into Eliot's side. Eliot ran a calloused finger down the silken twists of one perfect braid, wiped the wetness from his cheeks, closed his eyes, and slept.

When he woke in the morning, Parker was gone, but the couch beside him was still warm. Despite the crick in his neck, he felt more well-rested than he had in days, weeks, maybe years. In the bathroom, he carefully and methodically unwound the evidence of the night, but when his fingers reached the last braid, he hesitated. He stared at it in the mirror, this tiny delicate little gift, and lowered his hand.

And if Nate squinted at him, and Hardison raised one skeptical eyebrow, and if Sophie obviously, tactfully, refrained from commenting, it was nothing to the beaming grin on Parker's face when she planted herself in front of him and began to weave her hair in strange perfect coils in the morning sun.


End file.
